A year after flexing its R&D muscles with a rollable laptop<\/a> that expanded its screen with a simple button push, Lenovo is back at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain<\/a>, with another somehow even more sci-fi concept device. This is the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop, a 17.3-inch notebook with a screen you can peer straight through.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The key draw is its bezel-less 17.3-inch MicroLED display, which offers up to 55 percent transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through, until eventually, you\u2019re looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Although the appeal of transparent screens in sci-fi films and TV shows is obvious (opaque screens are boring, actor\u2019s faces are interesting), it\u2019s a lot harder to put your finger on their practical uses in real life. How often, of course, do you actually want to see the empty desk behind your laptop? Would it be beneficial to be able to see your colleague sitting across from you, or would it be distracting?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of Lenovo\u2019s big ideas is that the form factor could be useful for digital artists, helping them to see the world behind the laptop\u2019s screen while sketching it on the lower half of the laptop where the keyboard is (more on this later). \u201cI am not a good artist,\u201d Lenovo\u2019s executive director of ThinkPad portfolio and product Tom Butler admits to me in an interview, \u201cbut I can bring something behind and I can trace it.\u201d In the room we\u2019re sitting in, that means pulling a bunch of sunflowers behind the laptop screen, but Butler pitches the idea of an architect being able to sit on location and sketch a building without taking their eyes off the environment in front of them. He even goes as far as to call the transparent laptop display a form of augmented reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Lenovo is the latest in a long line of companies to experiment with transparent displays. Samsung showed off a transparent laptop concept over a decade ago at CES 2010<\/a>, and even Lenovo itself exhibited a transparent smartphone concept in 2015<\/a> via its now-defunct Zuk Mobile subsidiary. But as time\u2019s gone on, we\u2019ve seen some early attempts to commercialize the technology. Transparent screens have cropped up as shop displays<\/a> and train carriage windows in China and Japan<\/a>, and LG says it actually plans to ship its OLED Signature T transparent TV<\/a> this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But there are some specific challenges with building a transparent display into a laptop. Most notable is resolution, which is more important on a laptop designed to show text than a TV designed to show images. That, incidentally, is why Lenovo tells me it went for a MicroLED panel over an OLED. Although the 17.3-inch display in this concept is only 720p, AG Zheng, Lenovo\u2019s executive director of SMB product and solutions, tells me that going with an OLED would have limited the company to a resolution as low as 480p. 720p still feels like a very work-in-progress spec on a 17.3-inch laptop like this, but at least text shown on the screen during my demo was perfectly readable. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another sign that this is a work in progress? It\u2019s not possible on Lenovo\u2019s current prototype to manually set the whole laptop screen to be opaque, regardless of whether it\u2019s showing white content, black content, or any colors in between. \u201cThat absolutely is something that we would want if we were going into production,\u201d Butler says. It\u2019s something that LG is using contrast film to achieve on its OLED T television<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n